Lily Wong — Born 1989, Seattle, WA. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Represented by Kapp Kapp Gallery, New York/ Philadelphia.

 

Wong studies our everyday dualities and contradictions in her vibrantly didactic paintings. Fable-like with their playful and mysterious narratives, Wong’s figures, which are usually set in a sphere somewhere between fiction and reality, explore the body as a vulnerable site of tension. Wong’s practice is a push and pull with cultural hybridity. Her works draw on the western cannon of figuration, while resisting the rigidity of their patriarchal norms. Her compositions are thoroughly contemporary while incorporating elements of her mixed Korean-Chinese-American upbringing where elements like skateboards and Cheetos bags intersect with fortune cookies and scholar’s rocks set within a Chaekgeori planar space. 

 

In her recent work, Wong has reincorporated color into her practice, thinking specifically about her use of yellow both for its ability to illuminate the body and as a symbol for Otherness and the construction of East Asiatic femininity; Yellowness has come to serve as a tool both to vilify and mute and to amplify and animate existence.

 

Wong earned her BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design and earned her MFA from Hunter College. Recent exhibitions include: Lily Wong + Ian Faden, Harper's, New York; and I Wasn't There, Kapp Kapp, Philadelphia.